A Room of One's Own first published in October of 1929 was based on a series of lectures that Woolf (1882 to 1941) gave at a woman's college in Cambridge. In many quarters, A Room of One's Own has the status almost of a holy text. Most know it based on one assertion: a woman needs money and a place of her own to write creatively. Like most of the small amount of Woolf's essays I have read I do not find her work really admits of paraphrase in any fashion that does not diminish the power and beauty of her words. I would say to readers of this post that you know you will probably get around to reading A Room of One's Own one day. My only suggestion is to move up the read by date to as soon as possible. It has a great deal to say about the reading life as well as the writing life.

I want to quote a bit from the work so the reader can get a feel for the exquisite prose of Woolf.

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world’, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written WAR AND PEACE .

You can read A Room of One's Own in just few hours. It can be read online here . I am very glad I have at last read this canon status work and I think most others will also feel the same way once they finally read it.

7 comments:

It's such a great book for budding writers, especially given the realities Woolf faced as a woman writer competing for face time. I wrote a short review of this as well--here it is if you're interested.

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My blog deals with the literary treatment of Reading Centered lives in the 21st Century and beyond--short stories, Katherine Mansfield, classics, post colonial Asian fiction, Irish short stories and quality modern fiction are some of my interests